Tuesday, November 26, 2019

JULIET THE MANIAC


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Juliet the Maniac, Juliet Escoria, Melville House, 2019, 316 pp
 
Juliet Escoria is the current wife of Scott McClanahan, whose novel The Sarah Book I reviewed last. I received both books through my subscription to The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. The Sarah Book had been languishing on my pile of unread TNB books so when I received Juliet the Maniac recently I decided to read the two books back to back. I admit to a bit of voyeurism in wanting to see how these two writers came to be married. Ha! I learned not a thing about that.
 
Juliet's book is a fictionalized account of her own teenage years. A genre called autofiction has been around since a French author, Serge Dubrovsky, coined the term in reference to his novel, Fils. (ref: Wikipedia.) In her interview on Otherppl, Juliet says that after years of trying to write her story in memoir form, she was finally able to do so in an autofiction format. She does it quite well.

When Juliet was 14 years old, during a period of stress as an honors student aiming for a prestigious college where she intended to study literature, she began to experience hallucinations, panic attacks and insomnia. Then came self-harm and ultimately a suicide attempt. She was diagnosed as bipolar and put on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs.

Possibly because she was only 14 and it was the 1990s, she also began drinking and consuming street drugs. The upshot of all that, after a second suicide attempt, was her parents enrolling her in a "therapeutic boarding school" in a remote area of Northern California.

Juliet came from a middle class Southern California family, not deprived in any way, with loving parents. These parents were so committed to saving her life that they committed her.

For some reason I am drawn to such stories: The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, are a few I have read. Actually I know the reason. I had a bit of a breakdown during my sophomore year in college. I begged my parents to get me to a psychiatrist but my father, for no reason he ever explained, refused. All he would say was that it was dangerous to fool around with someone's mind. That was in the mid-60s.

Somehow I recovered enough to work out my problems as a young college woman on my own, although not in any ways that made my parents happy. All in all though, I feel I've had something like a guardian angel watching over me and here I am.

Juliet's "therapeutic boarding school" used a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, psych meds and restraint on its patients along with regular schooling and some other weird and questionable techniques. But she managed to "graduate" and return home, then go on to college. She writes about the whole experience with an exquisite realism touched with humor and no self pity. Her intelligence and bravery come shining through her prose.

According to her Otherppl interview, she is able to function in life on a finely-tuned prescription of medications though the fine tuning has put her through its own kind of hell. She now teaches, she has published a collection of poetry, Witch Hunt, and a story collection, Black Cloud. It appears to be a happy occurrence that she and Scott McClanahan found each other.

Her book, Juliet the Maniac, is amazing in my opinion. I hope that the young women who need such books to know they are not alone, find hers.

14 comments:

  1. Wow, what an interesting sounding read!! All these literary terms like autofiction, creative nonfiction, etc. are sometimes confusing.

    I think I would like to read both Juliet the Maniac and The Sarah Book as I have a fascination with these types of deep reads, but at the same time can find them too heavy. It's all about reading these types of books in small doses.

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    1. Despite the subject matter, Juliet was less heavy than The Sarah Book. Plus they are fairly short. If that helps.

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  2. sounds familiar... lots of persons have trouble around 19-20... i know i surely did... it must have taken a lot of courage for Ms. Escoria to write this book; i admire that a lot... and you for reading and posting about it...

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    1. It is surely a rough time, at least in our culture. Thank you, mudpuddle.

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  3. This sounds like an important book that is worth the read. Bipolar and other mental illnesses are no joke. There are so many people suffering. I agree with Muddpuddle. It is not easy to put out a book for all the world to read about one’s experiences.

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    1. In her interview she said she knew she had to write about it so she could get past it. I may be making this up, but I had the idea that she felt perhaps publishing it could help others as well.

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  4. I'm glad she's in a happier place now. These kinds of books attract me too. Like trying to understand the human experience.

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  5. I'm really glad you share your own connections from your life to some of the books you review. That frankness is refreshing and much-needed.

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    1. It's good you like that because I can't help myself-:)

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  6. I remember the years 19-20 in my own life when I felt my world was coming apart and could never be mended again. I, too, got no professional help with that and struggled for years - and sometimes still do - to make sense of it all. So, I can fully empathize with the author (although my problem wasn't bipolar) and with you. Perhaps it is a common if not universal problem of those years. Anyway, this sounds like a very interesting book, one that I might like to read.

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    1. Yes, hoo, those years. I don't know what I would do without books to make me feel less alone. But music too. During that time for me the Rolling Stones Paint It Black was my song!

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  7. I need this book in my life right now. I just think I could connect so well with this author in the same way I cold connect with her husband's novel. I also had a very rough patch 15-17. My doctor recommended me for therapy but since I was under age my parents had access to everything I said and when my mother found out what I'd said she told me I could never go back. I wish I'd been able to continue as I think it would've helped me reach the point I'm at now but much faster.

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    1. It is so hard when one is underage and not able to make one's own decisions about such things. Once I got to University of Michigan in my junior year I studied some psychology and got some help from the health services there. From then on I used what I found that helped me and left behind what didn't. It was the late 60s and I became a hippy and things were pretty loose. I never did graduate from college but became a musician instead. Then a feminist! But life is hard no matter what. You never really know what is going to happen. Thankfully I have had a great partner for many years and he never hurts me in any way, gives me lots of freedom as well as support. For all that, I have been helped more by reading books than anything else. So I hope you get to read both of those books.

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